Innovation Pilgrimage (1 of 2).

Attending much of the Front End Innovation 2009 conference  this week left me with some mixed feelings about the state of the Innovation marketplace.  I’ll share my thoughts in two blog posts.

First, the lens through which I observe this market:  I was introduced to Idea Management and Innovation processes when I worked at the Center for Applied Technology at Fidelity Investments.  I produced innovation events (an approach we used) and managed employee communities addressing strategic initiatives – in effect, funded innovation.  I leveraged cross-organizational communities and collaboration tools.  We also experimented with ideation and innovation platform tools (such as Imaginatik, BrightIdea, and a few homegrown attempts too), a variety of innovation campaign models (open, targeted, facilitated, etc.) and related IT governance processes (such as Technology Readiness Levels and other methods). Our results ranged from substantial financial successes to utter failures (resulting in people getting the boot).  When I was at Forrester Research I was exposed to other elements of the innovation marketplace too.  Through my collaboration with Chris Townsend, an incredibly enlightened analyst and now VP of Marketing at inova software, I published a report on the topic of Enterprise Innovation which is available to Forrester clients.  After revealing my perch, let me share my observations from this week.

Vitality.  I was impressed with how important the concept of innovation was to many companies.  This was especially the case with consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs), who must produce new products to remains competitive (e.g. 100 calorie-sized things), and pharma companies who are on a relentless pursuit to find the molecule that addresses a particular ailment.  Services companies also expressed their need to innovate in order to improve services, cut costs, leverage adjacent opportunities, and address changes that impact their markets (such as the economy, regulations, and  competitive  landscapes).  

Innovation is important to these participants and their companies.  So important that some expressed resentment that they are “first to get cut” in a down market (if they are in the R&D space), and that marketing tends to command much greater budgets (“the talkers get the money, the doers don’t.”)  But evidence suggests that many companies take advantage of down markets to innovate.  After all, there is a clear need to reconsider and prioritize, and there are talented resources available to tap into.  Most saw that they operate at the nexus of risk and opportunity.

Diversity. The next realization was that the term innovation means about as many different things as the word “God” means to a diverse group of people.  The convention attendees believed in it, but were very much aware that some people don’t.  They support their beliefs with prophets, legends, and texts.  Almost everyone I spoke to described something they called innovation, but no two people described the same thing.  

One such prophet who spoke at the conference was Jim Collins, author of Good to Great.  He is an amazing person with a gift of insight.  John Kao, author of Innovation Nation spoke too, as did many others.  I was impressed with most of the talks.  I heard brilliant insight, inspiration, and articulation; but also confusion.

Confusion.  The part that bothered me most was that there was a lack of expressiveness and consistency in the use of terminology.  One speaker even showed the IBM video making fun of these new terms. But the joke is on the innovation industry, since most outsiders don’t understand what they mean or how they bring value.

I asked the vendors at the exhibit “How do you help clients innovate?”  Design firms said “Clients give us a challenge and money, we  innovate a solution for them.” So I asked who does the innovating.  In some cases they say “we have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of brilliant people who work for us.”  Other say they tap into the voice of the crowd via the Internet.  Others tap into your customers.  And still others tap into your employees.  There were also a few platform vendors who provide tools to help extract and manage the flow of ideas in their formative stages, as well as those who help with latter stage processes of market analysis, new product development, and prototyping workflows.

I also spoke with innovation managers at many companies, and heard their needs and processes – which had little to do with design inspirations and workflow platforms.  They focused on corporate fundamentals – like developing their right talent pool and skills within their companies, organizing more effectively to take advantage of leverage-able knowledge, and dealing with strategies about being first to market, being a fast-follower, missing the market, or failing-fast – each with significant implications to budget, and more importantly, job preservation.

I asked: Does innovate mean come up with a new idea or deliver something new?  When you innovate, do you transform or improve?  Are ideas cheap and easy to get or are they valuable treasures to develop and harvest? Do we need to turn serendipity into a workflow process or do we need to include serendipity into our existing processes?  Who do you turn to, the experts or the masses?

I could have asked “what does holiness mean?” and I would have heard fewer opinions.  I heard reasonable positions, but they were fairly entrenched.  A voice of the customer vendor said “how could you ask the people who came up with the crap you sell to come up with better crap if they don’t know what the customers really want.”  They are right.  But the other vendor said “Your customers don’t understand the technicalities, regulations, or competition the way your employees do.  But you are not tapping into the talent that you trust – you hired them and pay them, now listen to them!”  They make a great point too. If everyone is right, maybe we are talking about different things.

Let me end part one with the promise that part two of this post will bring some clarity by finding parallels between innovation management, knowledge management, and Enterprise 2.0.

Tagged as: barriers, collaboration, community, conference, confusion, expert, idea management, innovation, workplace